This post is an introduction to the next episode of the BoOkmArks: Open Conversations About OA Books series. A live session will be held via this Zoom link on November 10th at 16:00 CEST / 15:00 BST, when we will interview Pierre Mounier, OPERAS Coordinator, OpenEdition Associate Director and the DOAB Co-Director, about the OPERAS project. If you have questions for Pierre, please add them to the comments section below so they can be included in the conversation on November 10th — and join us at the event if you can!
OPERAS (Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities) is a project funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, aiming at advancing open scholarly communication in the SSH area. A project of considerable scale, OPERAS is governed by three Assemblies, has over 40 members, with the core members responsible for developing the project’s strategy representing different countries across Europe: France, UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Greece, Croatia, Slovenia and Portugal.
Its vision is ambitious: “ to make Open Science a reality for research in the SSH and achieve a scholarly communication system where knowledge produced in the SSH benefits researchers, academics, students and more generally the whole society across Europe and worldwide, without barriers.” Within OPERAS several special interests group look at a wide variety of aspects of Open Science for SSH: that of advocacy, best practices, common standards and FAIR principles, multilingualism, business models, platforms and tools.
OPERAS also works on developing a range of services to the community, aiming at addressing gaps in the existing scholarly communication infrastructure. Most of the services look into gathering data on OA monographs in a one single access point, offering info on peer reviewed OA monographs, their usage metrics across multiple platforms, and providing a discovery tool for OA sources in different languages and multiple sources. With the Research for Society Service, OPERAS wants to ensure that the SSH research interacts with the society at large rather than staying in a hermetic environment of sometimes very niche disciplines.
At the beginning of November OPERAS held an annual conference, under the title “Opening up Social Sciences and Humanities in Europe: From Promises to Reality”. The “OPERAS Research Infrastructure in 90′: Mission, Vision, Action” panel tackled the question of what the project is about at its core. On November 10th we will talk to Pierre Mounier about just that: we will ask about OPERAS goals, its vision for the future and the upcoming projects for OA monographs. Join the session via the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6027862482
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